Many televisions have the capability of running an auto-program that searches received signals to identify channels on which broadcast information is delivered. Identified channels are recorded into a channel map. The channel map allows a television to limit the channels that the television automatically accesses so that a user does not have to pass through those channels that do not have broadcast information.
Identifying whether a channel does or does not carry broadcast information can take a second or two per channel. Further, televisions that perform auto-programs generally require a full auto-program to be run where all of the potentially available channels for all available signals are evaluated. Evaluating each available channel can take a significant amount of time. Additionally, while the television is performing an auto-program a user is typically unable to watch any of the channels.
As the number of available channels continues to increase, the running of an auto-program can take prohibitively excessive amounts of time. Further, some channels, such as channels received over digital terrestrial signals, can be more difficult and/or time consuming to acquire, resulting in still longer auto-programs. Additionally, it is common for television signal providers (e.g., cable providers, terrestrial signal providers and other signal providers) to reallocate channel assignments.
In many instances the reallocation of channels by the provider is transparent to the user because the provider supplies the channel allocation changes to provider's set-top-box. Televisions that do not use set-to-boxes, however, cannot utilize the proprietary information and thus the channel reallocation can be very confusing and frustrating to a user. As a result, it can be beneficial to perform an auto-program at frequent intervals. Because televisions generally require that a full auto-program be run searching all available channels on all available signals from all available input, the time to perform the auto-program is extensive. Thus, users are inhibited from performing auto-programming, and as such fail to maintain current channel mapping.